H. J. L. Struycken was a Dutch otolaryngologist, phonetician, and acoustician. After studying medicine in Groningen, in 1893 he started working at the Voorburg psychiatric hospital near Vught, where he attempted to distinguish psychiatric conditions from neurological speech disorders. His interest in phonetics and acoustics took Struycken to France and Germany, to visit clinics and approach instrument makers who could produce tuning forks for him to use in his clinical research.
Jules Antoine Lissajous was a high-school teacher, then held prestigious administrative posts in the education system of various parts of France. He had trained in physics, and defended his dissertation on vibratory phenomena in 1850.
This Excelsior phonograph is a model based on the Edison phonograph and produced by the Excelsiorwerke Cöln factory in Cologne, Germany, between 1903 and 1906. The original Edison phonograph (invented in 1877 by Thomas Alva Edison) is an iconic piece of historical sound technology that is universally associated with the beginning of sound reproduction in the late nineteenth century. It is based on the direct transfer of the vibration of air, caused by a sound source, onto a writing surface, then its playback. During recording, a stylus cuts a spiraling groove into the cylinder.
